I find it hard to blame the homeless (as you are) for taking advantage of a free perk, when it should be the cities and companies being held accountable for returning some portion of the profit back to those whom they are profiting from. Alphabet wants the information -- do you think they would have turned down a request to say that some nominal percentage of the revenue goes back to city social service programs?
The city should be kicking some of this money into infrastructure/services to help the homeless. Instead right now they're doing massive cuts and leaving people to the streets.
Also, if the city is going to provide a service here (which it has, by outsourcing to Intersection), it needs to make it "Available to Everyone", not just "Available". Right now because people can and do camp out there all day it's the latter.
These systems have cameras and the city and Intersection absolutely should be using those cameras to rate-limit peoples' use to make it "Available to Everyone". Except the cameras are facing the wrong way.
Imagine some homeless spends a day at the kiosk and gets a remote job that requires an hour or so a day of online presence. And he/she can _actually_ perform this job thanks to this infrastructure. A couple of months later he/she spends another day at the kiosk and finds an affordable apartment (most likely not in NY). And Voila, we have -1 homeless.
This is a real concern when you're homeless. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-homeless-prefer-stre...
Also, I'm talking about a real guy. He's frequently camped out at the LinkNYC terminals on my corners. (55th & 8th and 56th & 8th).
Of course this is HN where everyone is a self-made success and it's easier to pretend we care about the poor than actually care about the poor. I've been down this road here before.